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With Berkeley’s biggest neighbor planning to add over two million square feet of girth in the coming 15 years, residents gathered Wednesday to tell UC Berkeley to slow down before it gobbles the town whole.
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After 31 years as one of the nation’s most prestigious centers for foreigners to come and learn the English language, class was officially dismissed at Berkeley’s English Language Program (ELP) Thursday.
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The Florida version of the 2000 presidential election proved that punch cards are problematic. California’s adventures with touchscreen voting machines—including what amounts to a blanket decertification by the California secretary of state—demonstrated that this form of tally has some problems as well. Paper balloting seems a relic of the distant past. With the November general elections quickly approaching, many are wondering how they can ensure that their votes actually are counted.
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The proposed fiscal year 2005 City of Berkeley budget presented to the City Council by City Manager Phil Kamlarz Tuesday night erases Berkeley’s $10 million general fund deficit without reducing—as some citizens had feared—fire services or eliminating school crossing guards. What it does to other city jobs is another question.
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Berkeley’s budget mess is proving difficult to solve, but easy to trace. The city, like 248 other local agencies, has gambled and so far lost on a hastily passed 2000 state law to boost employee retirement benefits on the promise that the state retirement fund had the cash reserves to cover their short term costs.
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There is videotape of the beatings by the six guards, available on the Internet for download. Soft and grainy and shot from a distance, still, what is happening is unmistakable. Two prisoners are lying sprawled on the floor, face down, unresisting. An L.A. Times news article graphically describes the scene: “[One of the guards] sits astride [one of the prisoners and] begins punching him with alternating fists, landing a total of 28 blows. At one point, [the guard] can be seen lifting [the prisoner’s] head by the hair in what looks like an effort to get a better angle for his punch. A few feet away, the tape shows [a second guard] slugging [the other prisoner] and using his right knee to pummel him in the neck area as the [prisoner] lies motionless. … One [guard] is seen shooting the [prisoners] with a gun that fires balls of pepper spray, while another sprays their faces with mace.”
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Millions of witnesses were shocked by the graphic photographs of American soldiers reveling in the vicious torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, notorious for torture and massive executions under Saddam Hussein. The photographs depicted images of a prisoner, his head covered in a Ku Klux Klan-style hood with wires fixed to his fingers, toes and genitals; nude inmates piled in a human pyramid; a triumphant soldier named Chip Frederick sitting on top of a naked prisoner while Private Lynndie England shows a “thumbs up” sign while pointing to the genitals of a detainee forced to masturbate; a dog attacking a prisoner; stripped inmates being forced to simulate sex with each other and beat one another.
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The recent commentary in the Berkeley Daily Planet by opponents of the new Shasta Fire Station is proof that anti-civic behavior does not die easily. These opponents, having watched a failed appeal to the City Council and a failed law suit against the city (by individuals) to block construction of the fire station, are now attempting a last stand by discrediting the results of an exhaustive four-year public process that produced the program and final design for the new fire station. They are now arguing that the station is unnecessarily large and that the city should not be spending money in tight financial times. They say that the new station will be “an oversized, exorbitantly expensive building” even though it is being built in an area where some of the houses are larger then the size of the new station. Let’s be clear: this is not a group of concerned citizens trying to protect the city’s financial interest but some of the same group that have argued that “a fire station is inappropriate in our bucolic neighborhood.”
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When the Berkeley Youth Orchestra takes the stage this Sunday for their final program of the season, it’s quite possible that no one will be having more fun than the performer in the spotlight, 13-year old Jasiu Purat. The winner of the orchestra’s concerto competition, Purat defies cliches of the talented young musician under pressure to excel. Instead, he simply describes his musical activities as opportunities to enjoy himself.
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Impact Theatre is up to another one of its delightful pieces of nonsense, the three part Money and Run, staging it—as usual—at La Val’s Subterranean Theatre. That’s what the pizza parlor on Euclid Avenue has dubbed the small black stage in its basement where so many good theater companies spend time while they work their way up the theatrical ladder to more awe-inspiring quarters. But Director Christopher Morrison isn’t much interested in that stepping-stone kind of thing.
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Editorial

Wow. It looks like the aging but still potent Disney megacorp might finally have met its match. Here at the Daily Planet alone we got a bunch of letters expressing outrage about Disney’s decision to bar its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Michael Moore’s new movie Fahrenheit 911. It’s an expose of, among other things, the Bush family’s long history of palling around with the Bin Ladens of Saudi Arabia. (Yes, those Bin Ladens.) Hot stuff. The New York Times has already written an editorial denouncing Disney. Maureen Dowd has made a skewering comment in her column. FAIR, the very effective media criticism organization, has taken up the cause. The FAIR e-mail newsletter quotes Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, about the reason for Disney’s action: “According to Emanuel, he had a conversation last spring with Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who asked him to cancel his deal with Miramax and ‘expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.’”
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